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English Grammar Forms

English grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.

There are historical, social, and regional variations of English. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some dialects of English. This article describes a generalizedpresent-day Standard English, the form of speech found in types of public discourse including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news reporting, including both formal and informal speech. There are certain differences in grammar between the standard forms of British English, American English, and Australian English, although these are inconspicuous compared withthe lexical and pronunciation differences.



Word classes and Phrases

Eight word classes (parts of speech) are distinguished in English: noun, determiner, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, and conjunction. (Determiners, traditionally classified along with adjectives, have not always been regarded as a separate part of speech.) Another word class is interjection, but thisis not described here as it does not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the language.

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open classes – word classes that readily accept new members, such as the noun celebutante (a celebrity who frequents the fashion circles), the adverb 24/7 (as in I am working on it 24/7), and similar relatively new words. The others are regardedas closed classes; it is rare for a new pronoun, for example, to be admitted to the language.

English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to (except, to some extent, in the case of words with inflectional endings or derivational suffixes). Some words belong to more than one word class; for example run canserve as either a verb or a noun (these are regarded as two different lexemes). Lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories; the lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, and running. Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another; this can give rise to new words, for example the noun aerobics has recently given rise to the adjective aerobicized.

Words combineto form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase. Similarly, adjective phrases and adverb phrases function as if they were adjectives or adverbs; but with other types of phrase the terminology hasdifferent implications. For example, a verb phrase consists of a verb together with any objects and other dependents; a prepositional phrase consists of a preposition together with its complement (and is therefore usually a type of adverb phrase); and a determiner phrase is a type of noun phrase containing a determiner.



NounsNouns form the largest English word class. There are many common suffixes used to form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age (as in shrinkage), -hood (as in sisterhood), and so on, although many nouns are base forms not containing any such suffix (such as cat, grass, France). Nouns are also often created by conversion of verbs or adjectives, as with thewords talk and gay (a boring talk, a group of gays).
Unlike in many related languages, English nouns do not have grammatical gender (although many nouns refer specifically to male or female persons or animals, like mother, father, bull, tigress; see Gender in English). Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings): as proper nouns and common nouns (Cyrus, China vs. frog, milk), or as...